Asia Trip 2011

Venezuela

We had a 17 “layover” in Venezuela, before leaving we asked the consulate in Bogota about whether we needed a visa to get in the country or not, they told us we needed one to leave the airport but it took 10 days and like 30 bucks per person, so we said screw it.

We arrived to the airport in Maiquetia, pretty tired at midnight, we decided it was worth a shot to try to go through immigration. We wait in line, get to the point where the officer is:

-Hello we’re here in transit for 17 hours

-Where are you going to spend the night?

-We would like to get a hotel, so it’s kind of up to you.

-Ok, have a good night welcome to Venezuela.

There were a few interesting things in the airport, a lot of advertising for socialism, the slogan “homeland and socialism or death” and a picture with big government projects, and the slogan “with socialism, the big milestones are done by YOU”

We got out of the airport and this cab driver approached us offering us to take us to a really good hotel and exchange currency. The official rate is 4.3 bolivares for one dollar, but he was offering us 7.5, apparently dollars are really hard to get for them, and so this black market comes up, the weird thing is that even at the unofficial rate things are pretty expensive, so using the official rate is really ridiculous…we went the unofficial way. Anyway the taxi driver was saying a lot of weird things and talking really fast, and messing up his conversion rates, so we really thought he was trying to scam us, also anytime anyone else came to talk to us he was like “hey these are my customers, don’t get in the way”…so we were pretty scared. But in the end it all worked out quite nicely, he took us to a hotel, where he talked to the manager before we got a chance and told us what the rate was. It turned out he was a really nice guy and was really helpful, he was just really aggressive approaching people and a little hyper.

We asked him to pick us up the next day so we could see the city for a while before we went to the airport at 5. He told us that since checkout is at noon at the hotel, we would be downstairs at 11:30, he also made sure to tell us that we had to check out at noon or they would charge us an extra night…like 3 times. Next morning I woke up at like 10:30, went outside and saw him there sitting waiting for noon to get there, and so we talked for a while. I wanted to ask him about Chavez and socialism, so he said that he’s the best president Venezuela has ever had and that he’s done a lot of great things for the people and the country. However he started teasing the parking lot guy and the manager of the hotel about it, and everytime he asked they got serious and replied something like “How I feel about Chavez is my problem not yours, and I don’t want to talk about it”, then the driver made fun of them.

Oh and at one point my mom sat in the restaurant and pulled out some work stuff, he started telling her how if she was traveling and on vacation she shouldn’t do work.

We asked the driver to take us to Caracas (about 20 mins away), and for some reason he just really didn’t want to go, he started saying that we didn’t have enough time, and it was raining in Caracas, and it was Sunday so everything was closed so there was really nothing to see there, we insistd a few more times but he just wasn’t going to have it “I’ll take you to this really cool place along the Caribbean shore, trust me you’ll like it a lot more”. During lunch he pretty much told us what to order and as soon as we got the chicken, he poured guacamole all over it and grabbed a piece.

He was a cool guy and after the shock and the scary part the night before, we decided to just have fun with it and see how much he would do.

Frankfurt

The flight to Frankfurt was not bad. The entertainment was good, Maria and I watched Tangled together, there was some Gnomeo and Juliet, Rango, Modern Family… The food was good and they got Maria some coloring books. Maria behaved awesomely, it’s incredible how good she is for a 7 year old, yes, there was a lot of entertainment but still she behaved really well for a 7 year old in a 10 hour flight. Oh at some point a baby started crying and somebody yelled “somebody give that baby a bottle”, jerk.

Kolkata

Nothing too exciting in Frankfurt or in the flight to Calcutta, same movies, which was awesome and Maria really liked. In Calcutta everyone was bloen away by Maria Jose, pretty much everyone who saw her stared for a while and smiled at her, I guess we were the weird ones there. She went to buy some kit-kat and I gave her the money to pay, the guys at the store were really happy and smiling at her a lot, when she said “thank you” the guy asked her what her name was and how old she was, and gave her a second bag of candy for free! Everyone in India was really cool my mom needed to get a hold of people in Colombia and a guy offered us his cell-phone to try to access the internet and to try to make a phone call, just like that. Security at the Kolkata airport is weird and pointless, you can’t get into the airport unless you have a ticket, then you get into a waiting area and you CAN’T check in until like an hour before your flight, which sucked for us because of of our 8 hour layover. After that it was all good, we checked in, got through immigration (lots of Indian decorations in the immigration room, that was awesome). And as soon as we got on the plane to Paro we were in Bhutan territory…

Oh wait, up to here, Maria Jose was keeping a little journal where she wrote every country we were in and for how long. She kind of forgot about it when we got to Bhutan.